What happened
Two days after saying he did not want to "get out ahead of the caucus", Hakeem Jeffries backed a Republican-sponsored resolution to impeach Pete Hegseth. NPR reported on 6 November 2026, in a copy on OPB, that Hakeem Jeffries stopped short of backing impeachment. His words: "I don't want to get out ahead of the caucus."
On 8 November ABC News (abcnews.com) reported the change. "I'm a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution," Jeffries said, and "Pete Hegseth has got to go." Newsweek reported the same statement. Jeffries predicted "incredibly strong support for that resolution". He did not promise a united caucus.
Massie, a Republican, is the sponsor. ABC News reported that the resolution contains eight articles accusing Hegseth of violating the War Powers Resolution of 1973, along with other alleged offences. Newsweek reported a 34-page document: Article I says Hegseth carried out orders that violated that law, and later articles allege civilian casualties and extrajudicial killings. These are allegations. We take no view on them.
The timing is expected rather than fixed. According to ABC News and Newsweek, Massie plans to reintroduce a privileged resolution as early as Monday 9 November. Leaders must then schedule action within two legislative days of its introduction on the floor, and the Democratic conference meets on Tuesday. This comes days after the midterms, which we covered in The Midterms and the Constitution's Case for Gridlock.
The case for
Start with the text. The Constitution says the House "shall have the sole power of impeachment", according to Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute. The removal clause, in the National Archives transcript, names "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors", and its opening words reach beyond presidents to "all civil officers of the United States", as Cornell shows. Impeachment is also narrow. Judgment extends only to removal and disqualification, and the officer "shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment". It is a check on an office, not a criminal verdict.
Publius, long attributed to Madison, explains why the check belongs to Congress. In Federalist 51 he wrote: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." The remedy was not virtue but arrangement: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." On that reading, a legislator defending the powers of the legislature is the design working, not failing.
The facts of this case fit that reading better than a plain partisan story does. The lead charge, as Newsweek described it, is a breach of the War Powers Resolution, and the sponsor of the resolution is a Republican. Jeffries, for his part, said "Pete Hegseth has got to go" and predicted "incredibly strong support".
There is a second point in the defenders' favour, and it is also in the text. The same Constitution that gives the House the power to accuse gives the Senate the power to refuse. Conviction needs "the concurrence of two thirds of the members present", in the Cornell text.
Madison (Publius)
Faction cannot be abolished, so government must set ambition against ambition.
Read: Federalist No. 10 (1787) and No. 51 (1788)
The case against
The same author supplies the warning. In Federalist 10 Publius defined faction as a number of citizens "united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest", and added: "The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man." Faction cannot be cured, only controlled. A mechanism that begins with a simple majority in one chamber is a mechanism a faction can use.
Hamilton saw the danger in impeachment itself. In Federalist 65 he described its subject as "offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men" and warned that such a prosecution "will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties".
The procedure sets two different bars. The House impeaches by simple majority, as Newsweek reported, while the Senate needs two thirds of members present. A House majority can therefore act on charges that the Senate then declines to carry to conviction.
Recent precedent shows how a Senate can respond. In April 2024, States Newsroom reported, in a copy on Government Executive, that the Senate voted 51-48 to reject the first article of impeachment against DHS Secretary Mayorkas. Schumer "then raised a point of order declaring that the first article of impeachment did not rise to high crimes".
This case rests on Federalist 10 and 65 and on the Senate's two-thirds bar, not on any commentator's forecast.